So Fennel had written in the little room, when there was a perfectly good desk downstairs. Maggie wondered how had she gotten the video chair back there. It was a tight squeeze for a person, let alone an oddly shaped piece of furniture.
Perhaps she considered privacy a hard thing to come by and decided to create a space for herself.
Maggie understood that, having shared a bedroom with two of her sisters. Writing longhand by candlelight, though? A person could close the door and encrypt data on a cheap laptop for less trouble. Maggie clicked her tongue with aversion.
Outside, there was the sound of a car door slamming and an engine being started. The noise faded as the car drove down the driveway, away from the house. Maggie assumed it was one of the shared vehicles on the farm; maybe Namasté driving out to work the pumpkin stand on the highway or Tor going into town. She looked down at the next journal entry.
May 12, 1993
Namasté was going through her grieving ritual today. She burns sage, meditates, stays away from the group all day and fasts from dawn to dusk.
My heart goes out to her. Anyone who thinks that abortion is an easy choice needs to look a little closer. It’s been 24 years. There’s not a year that goes by she doesn’t stop to remember the little person she gave back to God. She cries every year, like it just happened. At the time, she was young, too afraid of her estranged boyfriend to bring his child into the world. He would have hurt the baby like he hurt Namasté (Beatrice.) She would not have gotten pregnant, except by force. Afterward, she had no money and nowhere to go. Her parents would not take her in. It was Tor (David) who helped her, who gave her shelter. She works on this issue during each sweat ceremony we have, every single solstice.
We have our conflicts, Namasté and I, after living together this long. Firstly, I don’t understand her refusal to wear underwear. It might be healthier for the vulva (debatable) but it’s just common courtesy to keep your privates private, especially when wearing a skirt. Secondly, she thinks my allergies are due to bad karma that I need to work out under hypnosis. If only!
That being said, I want to write something down, to remember: I love Namasté. She is my sister. I wish I could take away her pain. I wish that she never had to make that choice. I support her, 100%.
Maggie rubbed her lower belly. She imagined a young Namasté, faced with an unexpected pregnancy.
But I’m not pregnant. I’ve suffered a loss. My body is in shock.
Maggie rapidly shook away all thoughts of babies and focused on the matter at hand. What else didn’t she know about the people with whom she was currently living?
She began searching through journal pages for the names of the Originals. Almost every entry had their familiar names embedded. Scanning systematically for a part more densely populated with a single name, she found an entry about Sunflower.
November 21, 1990
Sunflower told me the most amazing thing. You think you know a person! I wonder how she’s kept it inside all these years?
I found a poem in the dryer. I asked if Sunflower knew who it belonged to. She grabbed the paper, then started to cry. I’m not kidding! Sunflower! I was stunned.
The poem was about her boyfriend, Jeremy, who committed suicide by jumping off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. This was back when she lived in Sonoma, California. Sunflower was missing Jeremy and had been working on the poem, accidentally leaving it in the pocket of her jeans.
The amazing part of the story is that she was blamed for his death. She was the last one seen with him before his body was found washed up on shore. He had fallen on rocks and was pretty beaten up, so they thought—here’s this big, strong woman who could wrestle an ox, with this barbed wire tattoo around her biceps—she must’ve knocked him around, pushed him over the edge, literally. The police said there were witnesses who heard the two of them arguing the day he died. The authorities were about to take her into custody when she fled the state. She rode her motorcycle across the country, sleeping in fields, getting by on very little, keeping quiet and off the main roads.
I remember meeting her in Des Moines. She was still going by her given name, Susan Wilcox. This was close to the time the rest of us were planning to start Original Farm. Tor brought her to the house on 12th Street, introduced her and said that she believed in our mission, that she wanted to be part of it. I remember thinking, “He trusts her. What’s good enough for Tor is good enough for me.” Not everyone felt that way. Tor obviously didn’t know about her past—I’m the only one she’s told. He accepted that she would fit in, that she’d work hard. And she has worked relentlessly, every day I’ve known her. She gets more done in the fields than anyone else here, plus baking with me.
Come to think of it, I do remember Sunflower getting nervous when we started inviting in summer boarders. There are other little things that popped into my mind. For example, she doesn’t like having her picture taken. And whenever we are too loud and Candy calls the cops, Sunflower makes herself scarce. She asks Namasté to pick things up for her in town, always cuts her own hair. In the beginning, she wouldn’t tell anything about herself but her name. It never occurred to me that she could be a fugitive. I just assumed she didn’t like a fuss. She’s so tight-lipped, so stoic about everything.
I see Sunflower in a totally new light. We are closer because of this. I’m glad she trusts me. I will not tell anyone. I believe her. She loved Jeremy. She did not kill him and is still devastated by what he did. She also feels betrayed by the people who informed on her. She thought they were her friends. No wonder she has difficulty trusting people. I hope the police never catch up with her.
TomTom bakes with Sun and me—she can sense the new closeness. Of course she thinks it’s because we are a couple, just because she and Namasté have a thing. (Who do they think they are fooling?) I wish Sun felt comfortable telling the others about her past. They might be more understanding, if they knew. Until she decides to tell, my lips are sealed.
Maggie wondered if Fennel’s trust had been her undoing. If Sun wasn’t guilty, she had gone to great pains to avoid being found.
Was the burden of keeping a secret from housemates too stressful for Fennel? Had she finally revealed the truth? Did Sunflower kill her and make it look like an accident to prevent others from finding out, or as a warning to whomever Fennel might have told? Questions crowded Maggie’s mind.
Could Fennel have told Namasté? It might explain Namasté wanting Maggie to come out and investigate. It would be easy enough to hide her true intentions from Sunflower, by using the pretense of Maggie coming to help around the farm. But Namasté didn’t act afraid—troubled maybe, and interested in finding out what had really happened with Fennel. If Namasté was worried for her own safety, why the serene façade? No one was that calm.
If Fennel had told someone, then that person could be in danger. Who had come looking for the journals? Sunflower? Could it have been someone looking for concrete evidence to get Sun extradited back to California? No, Maggie decided. That was a stretch—one call to the authorities would get that ball rolling. A two-year-old, handwritten account of Sunflower confessing that she had fled arrest would not be as relevant as simply revealing her actual whereabouts to the police. So why would someone want the journals?
Maggie began scanning the pages for evidence that Fennel had spilled the beans. A brief skim had Maggie wishing again that Fennel had recorded her thoughts in a word processor. She sighed. Perhaps there had not been time before Fennel died for her to write about telling someone Sun’s secret.
A knock at the door startled Maggie. As she got up to answer it, she heard a push from the outside and the surprised grunt when the door did not open.
“Hello?” Maggie called softly.
No answer, just the pad of feet down the stairs.
The lock was too tight to pull apart quickly—she had to put the door in just the right position to slip the hook out of its metal loop. By the time Maggie was able to look into the hall, no one was
there. She walked down to the second floor landing, but could not see anyone in the common room. The bedroom doors belonging to Loki, TomTom and Tor were all shut. Maggie tiptoed over to listen at each closed door, but she heard no sounds. She didn’t think it would be wise to go poking around in anyone’s bedroom and so proceeded down the next flight of stairs. The first floor was entirely empty of people. She did not venture outside or down into the basement.
Maggie went back up to the attic. At the third floor landing, Maggie paused to look around. The only other room up here was the office. Opening the office door and peering inside, Maggie found a card table littered with dusty papers and piles of boxes on the floor. There was a short file cabinet with the bottom of its three drawers left open. The office seemed like it was being used mostly for storage space, with only a narrow walkway through the clutter.
Flipping on the bare bulb, she noticed boot prints on the floor in the thick dust. The incandescent light glinted off a framed photo on the wall. Standing behind and around the Original Farm sign in the photo were the six Originals, looking younger, but still like themselves. Sunflower had her face turned to the side, away from the camera. TomTom’s hair was yellow.
The metal folding chair next to the table was pushed way back, as if someone had stood in haste. Among the papers on the table, Maggie spied an aerial photo of Original Farm. Across the top, was printed “160 acres,” which was scratched out and changed to “120 acres” with a felt tip pen. Looking more closely at the picture, she noted three areas outlined faintly in red, yellow and blue. The blue outline was around Original Farm as she knew it, from the road to the barn, out past the lettuce and tomato fields to the broccoli, cabbage and pumpkin patches. Inside the blue area was printed “110 acres.” The yellow area, much smaller than the blue, was adjacent to the barn and the next door neighbors’ property, which Maggie recognized as the house of the angry woman with the dog. Inside the yellow area was printed “40 acres to Walt and Candace Meadows.”
Maggie knew Tor had sold some of his family’s land before Original Farm got started, though she didn’t realize it had been to his nearest neighbor. The blue and yellow areas together added up to 150 acres, not 160 as was originally printed at the top of the picture. Maggie could only assume that the missing ten acres were contained in the red area, since nothing was written on that part of the photo.
The red outlined area wasn’t farm land, but timber which extended from just across and down the road from Original Farm to the very edge of River City. Thinking there was something familiar about the spot, Maggie remembered her earlier adventure with Loki.
That’s where we went walking.
Maggie vaguely recalled Loki saying something about the land belonging to the county, which was strange. If those woods were part of Tor’s land, why would Loki not have known about it? If he did know it was Tor’s land, why wouldn’t he just say so?
Moving the photo aside, Maggie saw a pile of letters and legal papers. She picked up a handwritten letter attached to what looked like a will. The letter began “Dear David.”
Footfalls on the stairs sent Maggie into a panic. She rushed to put down the papers and switch off the light. Sunflower approached Maggie’s bedroom door, raised her hand to knock, then turned toward the office. She squinted at Maggie warily.
Maggie rushed to excuse her presence in the office. “I heard a sound in there. I thought maybe bats or raccoons had gotten in.”
“I doubt it. Probably the wind.”
“Yes. Must’ve been.”
“I came up a minute ago and the door was locked. Maybe you were resting. Then I heard someone walking around. I thought it might be you. Do you want help making supper?”
“Really? Sure.”
Sunflower paused, looked down at her stocking feet.
“I lost someone close to me once.”
Maggie stood open-mouthed, cast between fear and astonishment.
“He was my best friend. He meant the world to me. I miss him every day. I think I know what you’re going through.”
Maggie struggled to recover her voice.
“So, anyway. Ahem.” Sunflower paused to compose herself. “I heard you throwing up earlier. I went through a bit of that, too. Sorry.”
Sunflower turned to walk back downstairs.
“Namasté thinks I’m pregnant!” Maggie blurted out.
Sun twirled around. “Seriously?”
“Yes. My period’s late.” Shut up, Maggie!
“Could be shock.”
“That’s what I think. I haven’t been sleeping or eating regularly. I went into a fog for a while. Nothing seemed real to me. I worked long hours.”
Sunflower nodded.
“My boss told me to take some time off. Coming here seems to have shaken me out of my depression a little. It was good to get outside this morning.” Why am I telling her this?
“Isn’t it weird, staying in Fennel’s room? I mean, her stuff is set up like she’s still around, like she’ll walk back in the door any minute?” Sunflower asked.
A vision of the Fennel dream floated into Maggie’s mind. “Yes, it’s very much like that,” she responded.
“I told the others we should make up the couch or set up a cot on the second floor. Loki insisted you needed a bed.”
“I’m okay. Thanks for your concern.”
Sunflower grunted and shrugged. “Let me know if you change your mind. About the bed, I mean.”
“Okay.”
Sunflower turned to leave a second time, stopped again.
“You know, if you do turn out to be pregnant, at least you’ll have something of his. Something alive.”
Maggie couldn’t think of a way to respond to that, but she felt like she had when she and Joe took a ride in the elevator of the Ruan tower. On the way back down from the top, he told her to jump. Due to the height of the building, the elevator gained a lot of speed on the way down. She took Joe’s advice and jumped and felt like she was in free fall. It was terrifying. She preferred solid, immobile ground.
Sunflower left. Maggie went back to lie down on the bed.
She felt like she was sky swimming again, falling up into the ceiling this time.
What was going on? Sunflower being friendly was the clincher. Maggie was not ready to trust the sudden honesty. It was entirely possible that Sun had come up to look for the journals and been surprised to find Maggie on the third floor. She could have been trying to confuse Maggie with a spontaneous show of friendship.
Was there something in the office she did not want Maggie to see?
Sunflower might also suspect that it was Maggie who now held the journals and, therefore, her secret. But, how would Sun have known that Fennel wrote about her secret, or that Fennel even had a journal, for that matter? Maggie couldn’t think of answers to her own questions. Her head was swirling and her stomach wasn’t much better.
If Sun knew, then why hadn’t she gotten the journals earlier and destroyed them?
Maybe that’s why she wanted me to sleep on the couch. I probably moved in before she had the chance to get them.
Another piece that bothered Maggie was the how. If everyone was in the fields when Fennel died, how could Sunflower, or whoever, have done it? Had they poisoned Fennel’s cup of tea? The more Maggie turned things over, the more she wished to see the autopsy results.
Without the medical report, Maggie felt the next best step would be to get to know her primary suspect better, play along with the new and improved Sunflower. She decided to accept Sun’s offer to help cook. Maggie would choose a labor intensive menu for supper. She and Sun could chat all afternoon.
Before leaving her room, Maggie found a better cache for the journals, should anyone come snooping again. She pulled a three-ring binder full of recipes from the flower cart, and tucked the journals inside. Placing the cookbook back on the cart, it looked no different than before, from the front.
Fennel’s secrets were hidden in plain sight.
Chapter 11
Deputy Lyle Rose turned his squad car east on County Road F31. He had just finished a phone call with Louise Carpenter’s mom, back at the station. A paper copy of the autopsy report was sitting on the car seat next to him.
No one else in the Sheriff’s department had wanted to deal with Louise’s friends. Bobby Fowler, the other deputy on duty that day, had harassed Lyle, seeing him ready to make the drive to Original Farm.
“You don’t have to go out there. Just make a quick call!” He pounded his fist on the desk. “What a bunch of weirdoes David brought home to live in his old man’s house. What was he thinking?”
Bobby’s significant jowls quivered, his skin working up to a bright red patina.
“Louise Carpenter was a respected member of the community. She was on the City Council. David and his friends have a legitimate business.”
Bobby snorted. Lyle put his hat on over close-cropped curls and got up to leave.
“Not a day has gone by this week that I haven’t gotten a call from Namasté, asking if we have permission to share the autopsy results.”
“Namasté? What the hell kind of name is that?”
Lyle didn’t answer. He limped over to the coat rack and pulled on his jacket. He tucked the report under his arm.
“Headed out?” Sheriff Ken Blodger poked his head around the corner of his office.
“Yes, sir.”
A toothpick twisted in a circle between the Sheriff’s lips as he spoke, “Alrighty. I’ll be needing you down in Waukee for a search around eleven.”
Lyle nodded. The Sheriff’s head disappeared into his office.
Bobby got in one last dig. “Keep it up, Rose. People will start thinking you like it out there.”
Lyle gave Bobby a stiff smile. Fowler’s still mad about losing that last game of chess, he thought.
In truth, Lyle did not mind visiting Original Farm. He had been there many times. Candy Meadows made nuisance calls at least once a month about her closest neighbors. She’d insist they were performing satanic rituals, or that their music was too loud. She was darned sure they were up to no good. Lyle usually took the calls, because he knew the kind of trouble it would cause if someone else in the department did.
Shallow Roots: An Iowa Girl Mystery (Iowa Girl Mysteries Book 1) Page 8
